Citing financial constraints, Pakistan’s government has suspended plans to create nine engineering schools that foreign universities had agreed to set up there with their own faculties and administrators, The News International reported.

In 2007 Pakistan’s Higher Education Commission, then led by Atta-ur-Rahman, announced that Pakistan planned to spend $4-billion on the nine projects with universities in Austria, China, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Sweden, and South Korea. Mr. Rahman was asked to resign in December amid allegations of financial impropriety.

Begum Shehnaz Wazir Ali, the new chairwoman of Higher Education Commission, told Pakistan’s National Assembly on Tuesday that the plan to set up the schools had been made in a hurry and nobody had considered its financial impact on the national economy.

Each school, if established, would have cost 45 billion rupees, or about $565-million, she said. Ms. Wazir Ali said the government did not want to spend money on “grandiose education schemes,” according to the newspaper. The government had decided instead to strengthen existing universities and other higher-education institutions, Ms. Wazir Ali added.

Earlier reports said the nine foreign universities were considering pulling out of the projects because they were leery of the worsening security situation and political uncertainty in the country.

In 2002 Pakistan began an ambitious program to reform its higher-education system by setting up the commission, which has since created programs to enroll more students in Ph.D. programs in Pakistan and abroad, to hire foreign faculty members, to establish new universities throughout the country, and to collaborate with foreign partners to open engineering schools. The reforms have been controversial.

Since late last year, many Pakistani students studying abroad have found themselves in tuition trouble because the Higher Education Commission had not paid their fees for the latest academic session. —Shailaja Neelakantan